Shift Work Schedule
The primary enemy of shift work is
fatigue. This fatigue isn’t due to the long hours of the shifts themselves. It
is the disruption of our natural circadian rhythm that causes severe bouts of
fatigue to occur. Our circadian rhythm gives our body cues as to when to
release certain hormones, when to “be” awake, etc. Over the course of millions
of years our bodies evolved to be awake during the day and to sleep at night.
Anyone working a night shift will feel the effects of circadian disruption
regardless of how much sleep they got during the day (Price, 2011). This means
that in order to reduce fatigue in the sample schedule, we can’t just assign
some teams to regular night shifts while others get the unfair benefit of
nothing but day shifts. The goal then, is to give the example UAV pilots more
time to recover from their night shifts.
The current schedule has a few
issues. One issue is the recovery times. Two days is a very short amount of
time to recover from a full work schedule but it can be doable. The problem is
that the pilots get the same amount of time off regardless of whether they just
worked a day shift or a night shift. Since we know that working at night
disrupts the natural circadian rhythm regardless of how much sleep the person
got during the day, the goal is to give the pilot more time to recover after
night shift.
My first idea was to simply have a
team for night and a team for day, and they could switch each month. This would
keep people on a regular shift and reduce fatigue, however, with the current
amount of staff this would be an impossible schedule. There simply must be a
rotating shift.
This new schedule does come with
some possible risks. It increases the number of days in a row that the pilots
are on duty, however with the increased rest time after night shifts I believe
the reports of severe fatigue should be reduced.
Price,
M. (January 2011). The risks of night
work. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/monitor/2011/01/night-work.aspx
No comments:
Post a Comment